Page 15 of To Clutch a Razor
He’s staring into the middle distance, his phone still in hand. When she touches his shoulder, he startles a little, and blinks at her.
“What happened?” she asks him.
“Why are youwet?” he replies.
“Say something in Polish and I’ll tell you.”
“Um… why are you wet?” he asks again, and for a moment she thinks he just said it again in English, before her lagging mind processes the sound of the words he spoke.
“I understood that.” She grins. “Thanks to the wila who lives in the fountain. It’s only temporary.”
She can feel her mouth moving in unfamiliar ways over the consonants, but she can no longer remember the feeling of not understanding them. It’s as if this is knowledge she’s had all her life.
Dymitr is staring. “You sound different. Your voice is… lower.”
“So is yours.” And it’s interesting to hear him in his own language, how much deeper and flatter he sounds. More authoritative than in English, where he’s more tentative, maybe, or gentler. And maybe it’s because the languages define a shift in him, with Polish the language of his Knighthood and English the language of his transformation.
She looks at the phone in his hand, clutched so tight his knuckles are white.
“What happened?” she asks again.
“My sister left me a message. Our uncle is dead.” His matter-of-factness is a little startling to Ala, though not surprising. Her mother was like that, too, in her declarations.Why dress it up? Better to just say it,she often said, when Ala scolded her for insensitivity.
But she’s gotten to know Dymitr over the last few weeks, and while there are many shades to his grief, the darkest one is when he shows no emotion at all.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“He was a Knight.”
“I’m not sorry for him; I’m sorry for you.” She touches Dymitr’s arm, lightly. He’s wearing a black denim jacket from the resale shop. When he got it, there was a patch on the shoulder from a national park, but he picked out the stitches to remove it, and now there’s just a dark circle where it used to be. “Your sister wants you to go to the funeral?”
“Yes.” Dymitr doesn’t quite meet her eyes. “Well, that too. She wants me to come to the house for the pre-funeral rituals with everyone.”
“With everyone?”
“Cousins. Aunts and uncles. My brother and parents. Everyone.”
Ala’s chest tightens. The plan was to go to Dymitr’s near-empty house to steal the book—where they would be alone, or nearly alone, with his grandmother. Now the house will be stuffed to the brim with Knights?
She’ll have no chance. No chance at all, to rid the world—and herself—of this woman who haunts her dreams. To spare Dymitr the pain of having to do it himself, or else surrender to madness.
“We should find out if they can change our tickets,” she says. “How long does the funeral last? We could maybe go next week—”
“What do you mean?” Dymitr says. “I’m still going. It will give me a good excuse to show up there, and the chaos will make it easier to get the book. They’ll be too busy to pay close attention to me.”
“You can’t possibly be considering this,” Ala says. “You have to at least wait until the funeral, when the house is empty. Don’t give them a chance to see you like this.”
“I know you’re worried. But trust me, it will be fine. They have no reason to suspect anything of me. And my uncle…” He slides his phone into his pocket, and looks down. “My uncle was kind to me. I’d like to mourn him properly.”
There’s just a slight wavering—in his voice, in his lower lip. Then he picks up his bag.
She wants to argue with him. No matter how confident he is that his family won’t suspect him, she’s still unnerved by the thought of him walking into that house like nothing has changed. Can’t they tell that he’s not one of them?
She can. She has from the start.
But he’s right—they have no reason to suspect that he’s changed. Not when they believe change is impossible.
She’ll just have to find an opportunity to get his grandmother alone. Maybe on her way to the funeral, maybe the day after, while she sleeps, maybe—
